Updated: 2015-09-06 01:35 EDT

1 Readings, Assignments, Labs, and ToDo

1.1 Midterm Test #2

1.2 Final Exam 8am Monday December 8

The final exam schedule is posted on the Course Home Page. Your final exam is three hours long, starting at 8am, in T117/119. It will be 180 multiple-choice questions. There will be a set of practice questions, and a quiz on those questions, posted before the exam.

1.3 Assignments and Lab work this week

Check the due date for each assignment and put a reminder in your agenda, calendar, and digital assistant.

1.3.1 Worksheets

The worksheets are available in four formats: Open Office (ODT), PDF, HTML, and Text. Only the Open Office format allows you “fill in the blanks” in the worksheet. The PDF format looks good but doesn’t allow you to type into the blanks in the worksheet. The HTML format is crude but useful for quick for viewing online.

Do NOT open the ODT files using any Microsoft products; they will mangle the format and mis-number the questions. Use the free Libre Office or Open Office programs to open these ODT documents. On campus, you can download Libre Office here.

1.3.2 Optional Bonus Assignments – extra marks

  • Assignment #03 HTMLOptional BONUS VIM Text Editor Practice
    • this is an optional worksheet for a BONUS assignment using vim
    • Optional Reading: The VI (VIM) Text Editor
    • Worksheet #06 HTMLOptional VIM Text Editor Practice
    • this is an optional worksheet for a BONUS assignment using vim
    • Optional command-line VIM tutorial: the vimtutor program on the CLS.
  • Assignment #05 HTMLOptional BONUS Midterm Assignment
    • This is an optional BONUS assignment reviewing your midterm test.
    • There is an Assignment #5 checking script available to verify the format of your file before you submit it for marking, but only people who Read All The Words here will know about it.

3 From the Classroom Whiteboard/Chalkboard

3.1 Learning the Material

Read All The Words by Alex and Colin

Read All The Words by Alex and Colin

4 Real Sysadmin Work

4.1 Awesome License Plate

Bye Bye Data

Bye Bye Data

4.2 Course Linux Server private address failure

After the power failure on Wednesday, private connections to the Course Linux Server were failing and resetting, and long file transfers (e.g. the hourly backup to my desktop machine) were also failing or terminating in the middle. Connections to the public IP address worked fine. I went on a diagnostic mission. Indeed, long file transfers to the private address would “stall” in the middle, sometimes finishing and sometimes not. Sometimes, trying to connect to the private address gave “connection timed out”. A PuTTY session to the private address would either not connect or would abort in the middle.

What finally clued me in to the problem was watching a running ping trace where I saw the TTL jump from 127 to 63 and then back to 127 again. I ran an nmap scan of the IP address when it had one TTL, and then another nmap scan when it flipped back. Here is the result of that diagnostic, an email message to the IT department:

From: Ian! D. Allen
Subject: duplicate DHCP IP for 10.50.254.149
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 08:45:37 -0400
To: Algonquin College Help Desk
Cc: Todd Kelley, Wenjuan Jiang

There may be a rogue machine using IP 10.50.254.149.  The DHCP server at
10.254.21.74 handed this IP to my Linux server, but some other machine
was already using it.  The result was intermittent connection failure
to my server, icmp misdirects, and failure of long file transfers.

You can see the result here from two successive nmap requests to the
same IP address.  One connects to some probably-Microsoft machine,
and the next nmap a few seconds later connects to my Linux server:

Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-10-23 08:29 EDT
Nmap scan report for idallen-cls-alg.dyndns.org. (10.50.254.149)
Host is up (0.00025s latency).
Not shown: 994 filtered ports
PORT      STATE SERVICE
80/tcp    open  http
135/tcp   open  msrpc
445/tcp   open  microsoft-ds
3389/tcp  open  ms-term-serv
49153/tcp open  unknown
49154/tcp open  unknown
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 5.18 seconds

Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-10-23 08:30 EDT
Nmap scan report for idallen-cls-alg.dyndns.org. (10.50.254.149)
Host is up (0.00084s latency).
Not shown: 992 closed ports
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
22/tcp   open     ssh
25/tcp   open     smtp
80/tcp   open     http
110/tcp  open     pop3
443/tcp  open     https
995/tcp  open     pop3s
2222/tcp filtered unknown
8080/tcp filtered http-proxy
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.32 seconds

You can see the same thing when running ping to the IP address; it
switches machines in the middle (the TTL changes):

64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=42 ttl=126 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=43 ttl=126 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=44 ttl=126 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=45 ttl=62 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=46 ttl=62 time=0 ms
64 bytes from 10.50.254.149: icmp_seq=47 ttl=62 time=0 ms

I've DHCP released that bogus IP address and obtained a new one.

You might find out why the DHCP server gave my machine an IP address
that was already in use, or track down why that machine is using that
IP instead of getting it properly from the DHCP server.

Linux doesn’t have a way to say “don’t ask DHCP for this IP address”, but I know enough about how Linux DHCP works to know that the previous IP address obtained by DHCP is cached in the file /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.eth0.leases and that Linux will ask for this address again even if you release the IP and re-request a new address via DHCP. So I shut down the eth0 interface, which released the current IP address, edited the file to cache a different IP address (I picked 10.50.254.160 at random), and then brought up the interface. Linux asked for 10.50.254.160 and the DHCP server acknowledged that. So now the CLS has its own IP that isn’t in conflict with that other machine at 10.50.254.149.

This is what sysadmin do.

4.3 Microsoft driver update disables unauthorized chips

If you’re a Microsoft Windows user, you don’t have access to the source code of the software you use, and you rely on proprietary binary software from your vendor. That means your vendor controls your computer and can make it damage your unauthorized chips

Take Notes in Class

Take Notes in Class

Author: 
| Ian! D. Allen  -  idallen@idallen.ca  -  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
| Home Page: http://idallen.com/   Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/
| College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/
| Defend digital freedom:  http://eff.org/  and have fun:  http://fools.ca/

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